Corruption buster Durk worked with Serpico

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN New York Times News ServicePublished November 18, 2012 - 5:15am Last Updated November 18, 2012 - 8:51am

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David Durk, a New York police detective who with officer Frank Serpico shattered the infamous blue wall of silence to expose widespread corruption in the city’s Police Department in the 1960s and ’70s, died Tuesday at his home in Putnam County, N.Y. He was 77.

The cause was cardiac arrest, his wife, Arlene, said. He had been treated for mesothelioma for the past two years, she said.

An Amherst College graduate who studied law at Columbia University, Durk joined the Police Department in 1963. He imagined a life of public service, as he put it rosily years later, to help “an old lady walk the streets safely” and “a storekeeper make a living without keeping a shotgun under his cash register.”

But what he found was a culture of corruption: of officers and superiors taking payoffs from gamblers, drug dealers, merchants and mobsters for protection and information, like the names of informers they wanted to kill; of officers stealing and dealing drugs, riding shotgun for pushers and intimidating witnesses.

In precinct after precinct, Durk found cash “pads” — lists of payoffs from gamblers — with shares for officers, sergeants and higher-ups. And behind the corruption, he discovered, was a litany of unwritten rules amounting to a pervasive acceptance of the wrongdoing, even among those not on the take — a code of silence, called the blue wall, which was corroding department morale.

Durk refused to join in, and became a pariah. While he made many arrests and was promoted to detective sergeant, he was shuttled among assignments, often just to get rid of him.

In 1966, while attending classes for new plainclothes investigators, he met Serpico. He too had refused to take payoffs, and had been shunned — and threatened — by fellow officers.

Beyond hating graft, they had little in common. Durk was a clean-cut collegian with friends in government and the news media, wore conservative suits and lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife and two daughters. Serpico was a shaggy, bearded loner who grew up in Brooklyn, served in the Korean War, joined the police in 1959 and lived in Greenwich Village.

But in 1967 they became allies, and over the next few years they complained to high-ranking police and City Hall officials, including Jay Kriegel, Mayor John V. Lindsay’s police liaison, and Arnold G. Fraiman, the commissioner of investigation.

They provided names, dates, places and other information, but were told that nothing could be done. Fraiman later said the information was not specific enough. Kriegel said City Hall was worried about alienating the police in a period of civil disturbances.

As Durk recalled: “The fact is that almost wherever we turned in the Police Department, wherever we turned in the city administration, and almost wherever we went in the rest of the city, we were met not with cooperation, not with appreciation, not with an eagerness to seek out the truth, but with suspicion and hostility and laziness and inattention, and with our fear that at any moment our efforts might be betrayed.”

Frustrated, they went to The New York Times. In a series of articles based on a six-month inquiry, David Burnham reported in 1970 that drug dealers, gamblers and merchants were making “illicit payments of millions of dollars a year to the policemen of New York.”

Lindsay created a commission, with the lawyer Whitman Knapp as chairman, to investigate. After testimony in 1971 from Durk, Serpico and others, the commission concluded that corruption was endemic.

It said Lindsay and the former police commissioner Howard R. Leary had failed to act, and recommended reforms.

But the fallout was minimal. Dozens of officers were prosecuted, but no senior police or city officials were charged. Politically, however, the hearings virtually ended Lindsay’s presidential aspirations. Serpico, promoted to detective, was shot in the face in a drug raid in 1971, and retired in 1972. But Durk, promoted to lieutenant, remained in the department for more than a decade, at times in elite investigative units but often in lesser posts.

“Corruption is not about money at all,” Durk told the Knapp Commission, “because there is no amount of money that you can pay a cop to risk his life 365 days a year.

Being a cop is a vocation or it is nothing at all, and that’s what I saw destroyed by the corruption of the New York City Police Department, destroyed for me and for thousands of others like me.”

David Burton Durk was born in Manhattan on June 10, 1935, one of two sons of a Manhattan doctor. He attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Amherst with a degree in political science in 1958.

He married Arlene Lepow in 1959. In addition to her, he is survived by their two daughters, Joan and Julie Durk.

After the Knapp hearings, he continued pressing corruption reforms, but he found himself largely persona non grata in the department, in other agencies he worked for and even among some reporters, who regarded him as obsessively overzealous.

He was banished to a small police office in Queens, then took a year’s leave at the United Nations to study crime issues.